You’ll never find, as long as you search, a name in sports as unique as Lourawls Tum Tum Nairn Jr.
The freshman point guard is indeed a natural man. He’s now officially dropped the Lourawls part of his name, and goes by just Tum Tum Nairn Jr. (at least for basketball purposes) Which means I no longer have to force any more obvious Lou Rawls puns into this.
That’s good because I really didn’t have a clue on how to relate “Lady Love” and theme songs to “Garfield” holiday specials to college basketball.
We covered the Lourawls portion of his name’s origin.
The Tum Tum part comes from the 1992 film “3 Ninjas.”
His mother gave him that nickname because Nairn was eating all the time as a child; much like a character named Tum Tum from that film. This is exactly how the official Michigan State game notes explain it.
Tum Tum Nairn Jr. made just the second start of his career last night, (his first came versus Indiana January 5th) and he led the MSU offense to “a true rout,” as Sir Ian Darke would say, of a very over-matched Northwestern team. MSU played with a very real sense of urgency to make sure they stay don’t fall down to the play-in game tourney bubble.
The score was 38-14 at the half and 55-21 at one point in the second half. The margin between the two teams was quite astounding when you consider that MSU and Northwestern played an overtime thriller in East Lansing less than a month ago.
This one however, was so lopsided that even Jackmerius Tacktheritrix could have seen the floor for Michigan State.
Tum Tum getting the starting nod meant that the regular starting point guard, Travis Trice, had to come off the bench.
“I don’t know. It’s not game to game,” coach Tom Izzo said when asked about Trice’s new reserve role.
“There’s some good things about it. There’s still some things that I struggle with myself about it. But it needed to be done for his sake and ours.”
Trice, who started Michigan State’s previous eight games, finished with a team high 16 points. So what does Tum Tum bring to the table?
“He pushes the ball better than anyone we got, and he defends pretty well,” said Izzo.
“He can get open ball screens better than anybody I’ve had in a long time, but he’s still got some things to work on.”
Indeed, he’s only a freshman, so there’s a lot to work on. In terms of future potential, check out Tum Tum’s Twitter profile picture (@lourawlsnairn) tumtum_toofast@nairn below. It’s a very bold statement of self-assurance he’s making there:
Magic Johnson and Mateen Cleaves are two point guards who were National Champions. They both headline the MSU basketball Mt. Rushmore. It’s more than a little premature to compare Tum Tum to Magic and Mateen. Even if Cleaves himself did say that Nairn “reminds me of myself.”
Paul M. Banks owns, operates and writes The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with Fox Sports Digital, eBay, Google News and CBS Interactive Inc.
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